Ryan Gould sent the results of his Quake3 tests with a Voodoo3 3000 PCI card in a G3 upgraded 7300 using nearly every ROM/driver combination from Beta9 to Beta13 (and including the Voodoo4/5 drivers up to 1.1.3 beta).

i was going to send you a report on using the
new b13 rom with 112 and 113b but decided i'd
waste a few precious hours and satisfy some
curiosity that ive had for a long while.
which means someone else probably had the
same curiosity.. (i just wish i had the
patience to do all of this again for different
opengl versions).

"
After reading the report by Ryan Gould over the weekend on testing
Quake 3 Arena with the various beta drivers/ROM combinations for a
Voodoo 3 card I decided to to a little testing myself. I was still
running the beta 11 ROM and drivers for my Voodoo 3/2000 running in a
7500 with a Sonnet 300/512 G3 upgrade card and 352MB built in RAM. I
was also using OpenGL version 1.12 with OS 9.04.
I didn't bother to reset my config file in Quake 3 so the numbers I
have will not be very useful for direct comparisons with other Macs.
They do provide interesting information on the differences between
beta 11 and beta 13 as well as OpenGL 1.12 vs. 1.21. My config file
is actually a customized version of a Locki config file tweaked to
suit my preferences with a few items turned back on for playability.
So the results are slightly slower than an unmodified Locki config.
The same config file run in my Firewire Powerbook 400 (384MB RAM)
will produce about 50.5 FPS.

Here is a breakdown of the three configurations I tested:

beta 11 ROM and drivers, OpenGL 1.12 average FPS: 34.5

beta 13 ROM and drivers, OpenGL 1.12 average FPS: 33.4

beta 13 ROM and drivers, OpenGL 1.21 average FPS: 33.7

My conclusion is that while the beta 13 Voodoo drivers cause a drop
in speed, Apple's latest version of OpenGL will increase the speed.
I'm sure there are other benefits of running beta 13 such as
stability, improved OpenGL compatibility, and 2D performance that I
would like to see over a period of time. I will eventually test
these new drivers with other games that didn't work well under the
beta 11 drivers to see if compatibility has improved. [Note: A reader noted the Voodoo3 B13 ROM allowed deep sleep mode on his G4 system, see the B13 feedback page for more details-Mike]

One interesting item to note is that on my Powerbook, I get a
performance improvement of about 0.5 to 1.0 FPS by leaving Virtual
Memory on. Virtual Memory causes a drop in performance for Quake 3
on the 7500/Voodoo 3. Unreal Tournament is faster on both machines
with VM off.

One other interesting item to note. I had been curious about how the
latest IBM Thinkpads with the 16MB ATi Rage Mobility cards stacked up
against our year old Firewire Powerbooks with the 8MB ATi Rage
Mobility so I did a direct comparison recently using the same Quake 3
config file used for the above tests. The IBM was a 750MHz Pentium
with more RAM than my 400MHz Powerbook's 384MB. While I was able to
get about 50.5 FPS average from my Powerbook (50.9 on one test), the
IBM with almost double the CPU speed and twice the VRAM was able to
only get 59.0 FPS average. So we can conclude that the latest and
greatest IBM Thinkpads are probably only about as fast as last year's
500MHz Powerbook.
-Paul Woodford
"

Those PB G3/400 Quake3 scores are much higher than I saw during my review of the PB G3/500, but that was with a earlier game version and OpenGL version. I suspect Paul may have a different config file as well. See the apps/game tests page of that revivew for my results.

Randy Mita, Brad Lau and I came up with a new slogan and theme for Mac advocacy - "Make a Difference: Be the Difference". We're asking that all Mac owners take advantage of every opportunity to let others know the Mac advantage. It's a grass-roots approach that will surely help.

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Thanks to my wife, the ultimate computer widow for putting up with all the time I spend with the site work, tests and email.